FINALLY. Oh, right, we're supposed to remain indifferent.
Blizzard has announced that five card nerfs will be coming next Monday, August 26, including a wild-only nerf!
The Nerfs
Five cards are getting changed with two of those cards (Luna's and Extra Arms) being reverted back to their values before the Rise of Mechs event.
- Conjurer's Calling now costs 4 mana (Up from 3)
- Luna's Pocket Galaxy now costs 7 mana (Up from 5)
- Dr. Boom, Mad Genius now costs 9 mana (Up from 7)
- Extra Arms now costs 3 mana (Up from 2)
- Barnes now costs 5 mana (Up from 4)
Discuss the Nerf 
Discuss the Nerf 
Discuss the Nerf 
Discuss the Nerf 
Discuss the Nerf
Blog Post
Quote From Blizzard Now that Saviors of Uldum is live, new cards have been introduced and powerful decks have started to surface. To make for a better ladder experience for Hearthstone players in this new expansion, we’ve decided to make the following card adjustments in an update next week:
Mage
While Conjurer’s Calling is a powerful tool that’s found in a number of Mage decks, when used in decks focused around cards like Mountain Giant and Sea Giant, it was creating extremely powerful board states at a point in the game where opponents didn’t have effective answers.
Increasing the mana cost of this card will make using both copies of the Twinspell card in a single turn significantly more difficult, postponing these potentially overwhelming turns until later in the game when the Mage’s opponent has more available resources to react to the board.
Buffing cards with the Rise of the Mech event was a big change in philosophy for us. While we are happy with the overall outcome of the changes, Luna’s Pocket Galaxy has proven to be an exception.
An early Luna's Pocket Galaxy can often leave opponents feeling helpless if late-game minions were drawn in subsequent turns. This has occurred more often than we had intended, therefore we're reverting its mana cost back to its original value of 7, as was the case before the Rise of the Mech event.
Warrior
We’d still like Dr. Boom, Mad Genius to be a great option for control Warrior decks looking to close out games, but right now the card gets played a bit too early. Increasing the mana cost to 9 should make it more difficult to find a good turn to play Dr. Boom, giving opponents time to make powerful plays as well.
Priest
During the Rise of the Mech event, Priest was one of the weaker classes in the game. Buffing Extra Arms gave Priest a powerful spell for the early game to enable some of their board-focused strategies.
With the release of Saviors of Uldum, Priest has access to many more powerful early game minions and has seen a large jump in both popularity and winrate. Between all of Priests buff spells and heal effects, it can be hard to fight for the board against them early in the game. Increasing the mana cost of Extra Arms back to 3 should give room for other decks to challenge them early on, while leaving the powerful Priest minions and combos untouched.
Neutral
Barnes has been a hot topic in Wild format discussions for quite some time now, especially regarding how oppressive this card can feel when facing certain Priest decks.
While we’re okay with Wild having a higher power level in general, Barnes stood out as too consistently powerful early in the game. Increasing his mana cost by 1 will let opponents have an easier time reacting, but still lets Barnes retain its identity as a way to summon specific minions early in the game.
Comments
except those two actually successfully killed the deck as intended whereas nerfing Kingsbane or Shudder would be pointless and just invalidate perfectly good cards that just happened to be the victim of some other abuse case
nerfs are not supposed to be dust dispensers
Your argument is double edged: [Hearthstone Card (Kingbane) Not Found] is a perfectly good card that just happened to be the victim of Leeching Poison, but we can also say that Leeching Poison was a perfectly good card that just happened to be the victim of Kingsbane (in fact before the release of K&C saw little to no play). Which one is cooler? Kingsbane. Which one is more difficult to nerf? Kingsbane again. That's what happened.
Furthermore, on the regard that "nerfs are not supposed to be dust dispensers", yes and no: we can say without the shade of a doubt that the Leeching Poisonnerf completely murdered the Kingsbane archetype as we used to know it, right? Well then, imagine a guy crafting 2 Doomerangs, Valeera the Hollow and a bunch of other stuff just because he found that weapon in a pack. Fun stuff, but then the balance patch hits and he's left with 80 dust and some niche cards (Doomerang fucking sucks).
The same thing can be said for Shudderwock: Grumble, Worldshaker is a tier 4 legendary and yet some people crafted it for that sole purpose.
Now, let's be reasonable: people can't pretend full dust refund if their deck gets hit, but if it is brutally murdered through a nerf of a common/rare card which invalidates other expensive and bad cards, well, I guess the situation is pretty different.
I do not like most of these nerfs unfortunatly..
Dr.Boom should have just been HoFed.
Barnes is still too god for 5 mana since BigPriest has no legit turn 5 play anyway besides from the 2/6 deathrattle dude maybe.
Extra Arms was very strong for 2 but I dont think it needed a nerf now.
Lunas Galaxy.. Yeah well that one had to be.. Although I enjoyed playing it in my Wild RenoMage.
Conjurers Calling still feels to good for just 4 mana but we will see..
The thing with the Barnes and CC nerfs is that now they come down at least a full turn later (two turns for the Twinspell CC double) which gives decks either more time to murder the Big Priest before he comes online, or time to get counterplay/reaction options. Not saying it'll be enough, who knows, but that's the reasoning. Don't underestimate the power of a full extra turn delay
Damn Blizz, i basicly knew this would happen but mana nerfs feel so bad. The community proposed many great ideas for conjurers and Boom! I know you think we’re all dumb and not able to process complex changes but give us a chance for once!?
From a balance perspective, they are great though. I
I think people are underestimating the impact the Dr. Boom change will have. This will slow down the game plan more than just when it is played but it guarantees that Warrior misses using the hero power the turn it is played. I rarely played Dr. Boom on turn 7 as a warrior but frequently played it on turn 9 so I could hero power immediately. Not saying the nerf is good or bad just pointing out that it will have a larger impact on the plays than people seem to think.
Not sure how the other changes will effect those cards or the decks they are used in. I will dust everything on day 1 then sit back and wait to see what happens to the cards to see if I craft them again or keep the dust from them.
so what? then aggressive decks beat it more often....which is kind of counter intuitive given Control Warrior's strength should be anti aggro.
Any value oriented deck that doesn't go close to infinite will still lose to endless removal and value generation (all in one card mind you)
They create archetypes like plot twist Warlock and then have them be invalidated by the fact that there is a top tier control deck that you have no possible way of beating...same goes for any other attempted control deck.
Then at some point there'l be a Deathstalker Rexxar reprint and Warrior is back in the dumpster because of their binary playstyle of "I remove all your stuff until you're out of cards and I win by default"
Agree man, it's not like Warrior will have some good plays alongside 9-mana Boom (yes, Shield Slam, but that's it). If it would cost 10-mana it would be practically the same.
Reverting buffed cards back to their original state? I hope they will now consider more about the consequences of buffing cards in the future.
They considered the consequences of buffing cards for 5 years before they actually did it. I don't think you can fault them for being too hasty. Frankly, 2 out of 16 needing to be reverted out of their first ever batch of buffs is fine with me. I am more than happy to accept that ratio if it means we get more bold balance changes like the Rise of Mechs buffs in future.
Very pleased with these changes - there are things I would've done differently, for sure, but they're at least hitting the right decks and not throwing a curveball card in there.
Luna's Pocket Galaxy is one that I see people wondering why it didn't go to 6 mana; the simple answer is that they don't want it to be remotely playable again. You can meme with it all you want, but this experiment showed them that a card like that being good is not fun, which is the most important reason it was nerfed. Putting it to 6 risks it still being too strong, whereas we know that it isn't good enough at 7 to be anything but jank fun.
Conjurer's Calling is still good, but losing the ability to find it from Magic Trick is pretty big. I'd have preferred moving it to only summon one minion - better removal, less good as a board builder - but I can understand them not wanting to change the functionality of a card too much, since historically those kinds of nerfs haven't exactly been good.
Don't really have an opinion on the other three - I don't play Wild that much, and I don't play many decks involving the other two unless for a quest.
I like you thinking on Luna's. Especially when your point about Blizz experimenting. What I had hoped is that they would try it at 6. I think the card was fun to play, if you hit it. And it did affect deck building. Trying at 6 for while at least, would have continued the test. If it still wasn't OK they could revert it to 7.
This.
I'm happy to see some nerfs and while some of them will definitely change the current situation, I'm a bit concerned about the effectiveness of others.
Luna's Pocket Galaxy back to 7 will totally see less (if not zero) play: it was unplayable before the buff and now its only chance is Tortollan Pilgrim, which doesn't look very convincing in my opinion.
Conjurer's Calling's nerf is the same I suggested literally a week into Rise of Shadows meta: 3 mana CC is just dumb and shouldn't exist. Now that it costs 4, it will be no longer possible to discover it from Magic Trick (pretty big deal) and Mages won't be able to play it three times in the same turn unless they have [Hearthstone Card (Sorcerer apprentice) Not Found] on board. Despite being totally fine with this nerf, I kind of liked Kripp's solution to change it in order that it would summon minions of the same cost you payed yours. Oh well, I don't want to be too picky, so I'll take it.
Extra Arms: I don't know man. Ok, but I don't know man.
Barnes: I don't play Wild despite following it, so I don't feel like judging something I haven't felt on my skin before.
Dr. Boom, Mad Genius - I think it doesn't totally solve Warrior's problem: don't get me wrong, nerf shouldn't annihilate classes, but the only difference I see is that Aggro will have an easier life, nothing more and nothing less. The issue of a "infinite" removals is still there and that's what worries me the most.
I guess it's time to craft Dinotamer Brann.
Mojomaster Zihi is the answer to [Hearthstone Card (Dr. Boom, Mad Genius) Not Found]
That's actually a really smart suggestion. I guess it will return to be played a bit now.
Not impressed with these nerfs, especially undoing the two buffs and just upping the mana cost on Dr. Boom. Blizzard needs to expand their horizons when it comes to both buffing and nerfing. There's more mechanics they can tinker with besides mana cost.
Im chill with all of these. I don't play control warrior but im glad the card kept its identity. You almost never see it in wild so when it rotates out of standard. It wont haunt wild forever anyways.
Dr Boom nerf is big guys. Missing a complete turn 9 is different than turn 7. Passing turn 9 doing nothing can let your opponent make huge plays. You could argue that sometimes the card is played at turn 10 and still great, but now you don't get to use the hero power or at least a 2 mana taunt. This will definetely cripple warriors game plan. I think the nerf was necessary and I'm glad they didn't overkill warrior with nerfing Brawl or something.
With mage both changes are correct. Making [Hearthstone Card (Luna’s Pocket Galaxy) Not Found] 6 mana would change the situation only slightly. I'm happy they nerfed it to the ground because cards like that should not even exist. Watching your opponent play 40 mana in one turn isn't funny. [Hearthstone Card (Conjurer’s Calling) Not Found] is not an overkill, playing it once in a turn shouldn't be that difficult.
Also rogue being nerfed from being the class that always being nerfed makes me sad.
Blizzard only needed to look at the enthusiast forums for Hearthstone to see countless good ideas to adjust cards but no, let's go with the boring mana cost nerf.
Do they even do any work? Must he great to work for team 5.